Autobiographical note 17 страница

Brücke] between different pieces of the dream’s manifest content. A chain of associations (Pélagie - plagiarizing - plagiostomes² or sharks [Haifische] - a fish’s swimming-bladder [Fischblase]) connected the old novel with the case of Knödl and with the overcoats, which clearly referred to implements used in sexual technique. (Cf. Maury’s alliterative dreams.) No doubt it was a very far-fetched and senseless chain of thought; but I could never have constructed it in waking life unless it had already been constructed by the dream-work. And, as though the need to set up forced connections regarded nothing as sacred, the honoured name of Brücke (cf. the verbal bridge above) reminded me of the Institute in which I spent the happiest hours of my student life, free from all other desires -

So wird’s Euch an der Weisheit Brüsten

Mit jedem Tage mehr gelüsten³

- in complete contrast to the desires which were now plaguing me in my dreams. Finally there came to mind another much respected teacher - his name, Fleischl [‘Fleisch’ = ‘meat’], like Knödl, sounded like something to eat - and a distressing scene in which scales of epidermis played a part (my mother and the inn-hostess) as well as madness (the novel) and a drug from the dispensary which removes hunger: cocaine.

¹ Both of the emotions that were attached to these childhood scenes - astonishment and submission to the inevitable - had occurred in a dream which I had had shortly before this one and which had first reminded me of this event in my childhood.

² I have deliberately avoided enlarging upon the plagiostomes; they reminded me of an unpleasant occasion on which I had disgraced myself in connection with this same University teacher.

³ [‘Thus, at the breasts of Wisdom clinging,

Thou’lt find each day a greater rapture bringing.’]

I might pursue the intricate trains of thought further along these lines and explain fully the part of the dream which I have not analysed; but I must desist at this point because the personal sacrifice demanded would be too great. I will only pick out one thread, which is qualified to lead us straight to one of the dream-thoughts underlying the confusion. The stranger with the long face and pointed beard who tried to prevent my putting on the overcoat bore the features of a shop-keeper at Spalato from whom my wife had bought a quantity of Turkish stuffs. He was called Popovic, an equivocal name, on which a humorous writer, Stettenheim, has already made a suggestive comment: ‘He told me his name and blushingly pressed my hand.’ Once again I found myself misusing a name, as I already had done with Pélagie, Knödl, Brücke and Fleischl. It could scarcely be denied that playing about with names like this was a kind of childish naughtiness. But if I indulged in it, it was as an act of retribution; for my own name had been the victim of feeble witticisms like these on countless occasions. Goethe, I recalled, had remarked somewhere upon people’s sensitiveness about their names: how we seem to have grown into them like our skin. He had said this á propos of a line written on his name by Herder:

‘Der du von Göttern abstammst, von Gothen oder vom Kote.’ -¹

‘So seid ihr Götterbilder auch zu Staub.’ ²

I noticed that my digression on the subject of the misuse of names was only leading up to this complaint. But I must break off here. - My wife’s purchase made at Spalato reminded me of another purchase, made at Cattaro, which I had been too cautious over, so that I had lost an opportunity of making some nice acquisitions. (Cf. the neglected opportunity with the wet-nurse.) For one of the thoughts which my hunger introduced into the dream was this: ‘One should never neglect an opportunity, but always take what one can even when it involves doing a small wrong. One should never neglect an opportunity, since life is short and death inevitable.’ Because this lesson of ‘carpe diem’ had among other meanings a sexual one, and because the desire it expressed did not stop short of doing wrong, it had reason to dread the censorship and was obliged to conceal itself behind a dream. All kinds of thoughts having a contrary sense then found voice: memories of a time when the dreamer was content with spiritual food, restraining thoughts of every kind and even threats of the most revolting sexual punishments.

¹ [`Thou who art the offspring of gods or of Goths or of dung’]

² [`So you too, divine figures, have turned to dust!’]

II

The next dream calls for a rather long preamble:

I had driven to the Western Station to take the train for my summer holiday at Aussee, but had arrived on the platform while an earlier train, going to Ischl, was still standing in the station. There I had seen Count Thun who was once again travelling to Ischl for an audience with the Emperor. Though it was raining, he had arrived in an open carriage. He had walked straight in through the entrance for the Local Trains. The ticket inspector at the gate had not recognized him and had tried to take his ticket, but he had waved the man aside with a curt motion of his hand and without giving any explanation. After the train for Ischl had gone out, I ought by rights to have left the platform again and returned to the waiting room; and it had cost me some trouble to arrange matters so that I was allowed to stop on the platform. I had passed the time in keeping a look-out to see if anyone came along and tried to get a reserved compartment by exercising some sort of ‘pull’. I had intended in that case to make a loud protest: that is to say to claim equal rights. Meantime I had been humming a tune to myself which I recognized as Figaro’s aria from Le Nozze di Figaro:

Se vuol ballare, signor contino,

Se vuol ballare, signor contino,

Il chitarino le suonerò¹

(It is a little doubtful whether anyone else would have recognized the tune.)

¹ [‘If my Lord Count is inclined to go dancing,

If my Lord Count is inclined to go dancing,

I’II be quite ready to play him a tune...’]

The whole evening I had been in high spirits and in a combative mood. I had chaffed my waiter and my cab-driver - without, I hope, hurting their feelings. And now all kinds of insolent and revolutionary ideas were going through my head, in keeping with Figaro’s words and with my recollections of Beaumarchais’ comedy which I had seen acted by the Comédie français. I thought of the phrase about the great gentlemen who had taken the trouble to be born, and of the droit du Seigneur which Count Almaviva tried to exercise over Susanna. I thought, too, of how our malicious opposition journalists made jokes over Count Thun’s name, calling him instead ‘Count Nichtsthun’. Not that I envied him. He was on his way to a difficult audience with the Emperor, while I was the real Count Do-nothing -(just off on my holidays. There followed all sorts of enjoyable plans for the holidays. At this point a gentleman came on to the platform whom I recognized as a Government invigilator at medical examinations, and who by his activities in that capacity had won the flattering nickname of ‘Government bedfellow’. He asked to be given a first-class half-compartment to himself in virtue of his official position, and I heard one railwayman saying to another: ‘Where are we to put the gentleman with the half first-class ticket?’ This, I thought to myself, was a fine example of privilege; after all I had paid the full first-class fare. And I did in fact get a compartment to myself, but not in a corridor coach, so that there would be no lavatory available during the night. I complained to an official without any success; but I got my own back on him by suggesting that he should at all events have a hole made in the floor of the compartment to meet the possible needs of passengers. And in fact I did wake up at a quarter to three in the morning with a pressing need to micturate, having had the following dream:

A crowd of people, a meeting of students. - A count (Thun or Taaffe) was speaking. He was challenged to say something about the Germans, and declared with a contemptuous gesture that their favourite flower was a colt’s foot, and put some sort of dilapidated leaf - or rather the crumpled skeleton of a leaf - into his buttonhole. I fired up - so I fired up,¹ though I was surprised at my taking such an attitude.

(Then, less distinctly:) It was as though I was in the Aula, the entrances were cordoned off and we had to escape. I made my way through a series of beautifully furnished rooms, evidently ministerial or public apartments, with furniture upholstered in a colour between brown and violet; at last I came to a corridor, in which a housekeeper was sitting, an elderly stout woman. I avoided speaking to her, but she evidently thought I had a right to pass, for she asked whether she should accompany me with the lamp. I indicated to her, by word or gesture, that she was to stop on the staircase; and I felt I was being very cunning in thus avoiding inspection at the exit. I got downstairs and found a narrow and steep ascending path, along which I went.

(Becoming indistinct again)... It was as though the second problem was to get out of the town, just as the first one had been to get out of the house. I was driving in a cab and had ordered the driver to drive me to a station. ‘I can’t drive with you along the railway-line itself’, I said, after he had raised some objection, as though I had overtired him. It was as if I had already driven with him for some of the distance one normally travels by train. The stations were cordoned off. I wondered whether to go to Krems or Znaim, but reflected that the Court would be in residence there, so I decided in favour of Graz, or some such place. I was now sitting in the compartment, which was like a carriage on the Stadtbahn; and in my buttonhole I had a peculiar plaited, long-shaped object, and beside it some violet-brown violets made of a stiff material. This greatly struck people. (At this point the scene broke off.)

Once more I was in front of the station, but this time in the company of an elderly gentleman. I thought of a plan for remaining unrecognized; and then saw that this plan had already been put into effect. It was as though thinking and experiencing were one and the same thing. He appeared to be blind, at all events with one eye, and I handed him a male glass urinal (which we had to buy or had bought in town). So I was a sick-nurse and had to give him the urinal because he was blind. If the ticket-collector were to see us like that, he would be certain to let us get away without noticing us. Here the man’s attitude and his micturating penis appeared in plastic form. (This was the point at which I awoke, feeling a need to micturate.)

The dream as a whole gives one the impression of being in the nature of a phantasy in which the dreamer was carried back to the Revolutionary year 1848. Memories of that year had been recalled to me by the Jubilee in 1898, as well as by a short trip which I had made to the Wachau, in the course of which I had visited Emmersdorf,² the place of retirement of the student-leader Fischhof, to whom certain elements in the manifest content of the dream may allude. My associations then led me to England and to my brother’s house there. He used often to tease his wife with the words ‘Fifty Years Ago’ (from the title of one of Lord Tennyson’s poems), which his children used then to correct to ‘fifteen years ago’. This revolutionary phantasy, however, which was derived from ideas aroused in me by seeing Count Thun, was like the façade of an Italian church in having no organic relation with the structure lying behind it. But it differed from those façades in being disordered and full of gaps, and in the fact that portions of the interior construction had forced their way through into it at many points.

¹ This repetition crept into my record of the dream, apparently through inadvertence. I have let it stand, since the analysis showed that it was significant.

² (Footnote added 1925:} This is a mistake, but not a slip this time. I only learnt later that the Emmersdorf in the Wachau is not to be identified with the place of the same name which was the refuge of the revolutionary leader Fischhof.

The first situation in the dream was an amalgam of several scenes, which I can separate out. The insolent attitude adopted by the Count in the dream was copied from a scene at my secondary school when I was fifteen years old. We had hatched a conspiracy against an unpopular and ignorant master, the moving spirit of which had been one of my school-fellows who since those days seemed to have taken Henry VIII of England as his model. The leadership in the chief assault was allotted to me, and the signal for open revolt was a discussion on the significance of the Danube to Austria (cf. the Wachau). One of our fellow-conspirators had been the only aristocratic boy in the class, who, on account of his remarkable length of limb, was called ‘the Giraffe’. He was standing up, like the Count in my dream, having been taken to task by the school tyrant, the German language master. The favourite flower and the putting into his buttonhole of something in the nature of a flower (which last made me think of some orchids which I had brought the same day for a woman friend and also of a rose of Jericho) were a striking reminder of the scene in one of Shakespeare’s historical plays which represented the beginning of the Wars of the Red and White Roses. (The mention of Henry VIII opened the way to this recollection.) - From there it was only a short step to red and white carnations. (Two little couplets, one in German and the other in Spanish, slipped into the analysis at this point:

Rosen, Tulpen, Nelken,

alle Blumen welken.¹

Isabelita, no Ilores,

que se marchitan las flores.²

The appearance of a Spanish couplet led back to Figaro.) Here in Vienna white carnations had become an emblem of anti-semitism, and red ones of the Social Democrats. Behind this lay a recollection of a piece of anti-semitic provocation during a railway journey in the lovely Saxon countryside (cf. Anglo-Saxon). -The third scene which contributed to the formation of the first situation in the dream dated from my early student days. There was a discussion in a German students’ club on the relation of philosophy to the natural sciences. I was a green youngster, full of materialistic theories, and thrust myself forward to give expression to an extremely one-sided point of view. Thereupon someone who was my senior and my superior, someone who has since then shown his ability as a leader of men and an organizer of large groups (and who also, incidentally, bears a name derived from the Animal Kingdom), stood up and gave us a good talking-to: he too, he told us, had fed swine in his youth and returned repentant to his father’s house. I fired up (as I did in the dream) and replied boorishly that since I now knew that he had fed swine in his youth I was no longer surprised at the tone of his speeches. (In the dream I was surprised at my German-nationalist attitude.) There was a general uproar and I was called upon from many sides to withdraw my remarks, but I refused to do so. The man I had insulted was too sensible to look upon the incident as a challenge, and let the affair drop.

¹ [‘Roses, tulips, carnations: every flower fades.’]

² [‘Isabelita, do not weep because the flowers fade.’]

The remaining elements of this first situation in the dream were derived from deeper layers. What was the meaning of the Count’s pronouncement about colt’s foot? To find the answer, I followed a train of associations: colt’s foot [‘Huflattich’, literally ‘hoof lettuce’] - lettuce - salad - dog-in-the-manger [‘Salathund’, literally ‘salad dog’]. Here was a whole collection of terms of abuse: ‘Gir-affe’ [‘Affe’ is the German for ‘ape’], ‘swine’, ‘dog’ - and I could have arrived at ‘donkey’ if I had made a detour through another name and insulted yet another academic teacher. Moreover, I translated ‘colt’s foot’ - whether rightly or wrongly I could not tell - by the French ‘

pisse-en-lit’. This information was derived from Zola’s Germinal, in which a child was told to pick some of that plant for salad. The French word for ‘dog’ - ‘chien’ - reminded me of the major function (‘chier’ in French, compared with ‘pisser’ for the minor one). Soon, I thought, I should have collected examples of impropriety in all three states of matter - solid, liquid and gaseous; - for this same book, Germinal, which had plenty to do with the approaching revolution, contained an account of a very peculiar sort of competition - for the production of a gaseous excretion known by the name of ‘flatus’.¹ I now saw that the path leading to flatus had been prepared far ahead: from flowers, through the Spanish couplet, Isabelita, Isabella and Ferdinand, Henry VIII, English history, and the Armada which sailed against England, after whose defeat a medal was struck, bearing the inscription ‘Flavit et dissipati sunt’², since the storm-blast had scattered the Spanish fleet. I had thought, half seriously, of using those words as the heading to the chapter on ‘Therapy’, if ever I got so far as producing a detailed account of my theory and treatment of hysteria.

¹ Not in fact in Germinal but in La terre: a mistake which I only observed after I had completed the analysis. - Notice the occurrence of the same letters in ‘Huflattich’ [‘colt’s foot’] and ‘flatus’.

² [Footnote added 1925:] An unsolicited biographer, Dr. Fritz Wittels has charged me with having omitted the name of Jehovah from the above motto. [Added 1930:] The English medallion bears the deity’s name in Hebrew lettering on a cloud in the background. It is so placed that it can be taken as being part either of the design or of the inscription.

Turning now to the second episode of the dream, I am unable to deal with it in such detail - out of consideration for the censorship. For I was putting myself in the place of an exalted personage of those revolutionary times, who also had an adventure with an eagle [Adler] and is said to have suffered from incontinence of the bowels, and so on. I thought to myself that I should not be justified in passing the censorship at this point, even though the greater part of the story was told me by a Hofrat (a consiliarius aulicus [court councillor] - cf. Aula). The series of public rooms in the dream were derived from His Excellency’s saloon carriage, of which I had succeeded in getting a glimpse. But the ‘rooms’ [Zimmer] also meant ‘women’ [Frauenzimmer], as is often the case in dreams - in this instance ‘public women’. In the figure of the housekeeper I was showing my lack of gratitude towards a witty elderly lady and ill repaying her hospitality and the many good stories that I heard while I was stopping in her house. -The allusion to the lamp went back to Grillparzer, who introduced a charming episode of a similar kind, which he had actually experienced, into his tragedy about Hero and Leander, Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen [‘The Waves of the Sea and of Love’] - the Armada and the storm.¹

¹ [Footnote added 1911:] In an interesting paper, Silberer (1910) has tried to show from this part of my dream that the dream-work can succeed in reproducing not only the latent dream-thoughts but also the psychical processes that take place during the formation of dreams. (This is what he terms ‘the functional phenomenon’.) [Added 1914:] But he is, I think, overlooking the fact that ‘the psychical processes that take place during the formation of dreams’ were, like the rest, part of the material of my thoughts. In this boastful dream I was evidently proud of having discovered those processes.

I must also refrain from any detailed analysis of the two remaining episodes of the dream. I will merely pick out the elements leading to the two childhood scenes on whose account alone I embarked upon a discussion of this dream. It will rightly be suspected that what compels me to make this suppression is sexual material; but there is no need to rest content with this explanation. After all, there are many things which one has to keep secret from other people but of which one makes no secret to oneself; and the question here is not as to why I am obliged to conceal the solution but as to the motives for the internal censorship which hid the true content of the dream from myself. I must therefore explain that the analysis of these three episodes of the dream showed that they were impertinent boastings, the issue of an absurd megalomania which had long been suppressed in my waking life and a few of whose ramifications had even made their way into the dream’s manifest content (e. g. ‘I felt I was being very cunning’), and which incidentally accounted for my exuberant spirits during the evening before I had the dream. The boasting extended to all spheres; for instance, the mention of Graz went back to the slang phrase ‘What’s the price of Graz? ', which expresses the self-satisfaction of a person who feels extremely well-off. The first episode of the dream may also be included among the boastings by anyone who will bear in mind the great Rabelais’ incomparable account of the life and deeds of Gargantua and his son Pantagruel.

Here is the material relating to the two childhood scenes which I have promised my readers. I had bought a new trunk for the journey, of a brownish violet colour. This colour appears more than once in the dream: the violet-brown violets made of a stiffish material and beside them a thing known as a ‘Mädchenfänger’ [‘girl-catcher’] - and the furniture in the ministerial apartments. It is commonly believed by children that people are struck by anything new. The following scene from my childhood has been described to me, and my memory of the description has taken the place of my memory of the scene itself. It appears that when I was two years old I still occasionally wetted the bed, and when I was reproached for this I consoled my father by promising to buy him a nice new red bed in N., the nearest town of any size. This was the origin of the parenthetical phrase in the dream to the effect that we bought or had to buy the urinal in town: one must keep one’s promises. (Notice, too, the juxtaposition in symbolism of the male urinal and the female trunk or box.) This promise of mine exhibited all the megalomania of childhood. We have already come across the significant part played in dreams by children’s difficulties in connection with micturition (cf. the dream reported on p. 685). We have also learned from the psycho-analysis of neurotic subjects the intimate connection between bed-wetting and the character trait of ambition.

When I was seven or eight years old there was another domestic scene, which I can remember very clearly. One evening before going to sleep I disregarded the rules which modesty lays down and obeyed the calls of nature in my parents’ bedroom while they were present. In the course of his reprimand, my father let fall the words: ‘The boy will come to nothing.’ This must have been a frightful blow to my ambition, for references to this scene are still constantly recurring in my dreams and are always linked with an enumeration of my achievements and successes, as though I wanted to say: ‘You see, I have come to something.’ This scene, then, provided the material for the final episode of the dream, in which - in revenge, of course - the roles were interchanged. The older man (clearly my father, since his blindness in one eye referred to his unilateral glaucoma¹) was now micturating in front of me, just as I had in front of him in my childhood. In the reference to his glaucoma I was reminding him of the cocaine, which had helped him in the operation, as though I had in that way kept my promise. Moreover, I was making fun of him; I had to hand him the urinal because he was blind, and I revelled in allusions to my discoveries in connection with the theory of hysteria, of which I felt so proud.²

¹ There is another interpretation. He was one-eyed like Odin the father-god. - Odhins Trost. - The consolation I offered him in the first childhood scene of buying him a new bed.

² Here is some further interpretative material. Handing him the glass reminded me of the story of the peasant at the optician’s, trying glass after glass and still not being able to read. - (Peasant-catcher [Bauerfänger, ‘sharper]: girl-catcher [Mädchenfänger] in the preceding episode of the dream.) - The way in which the father in Zola’s La terre was treated among the peasants after he had grown feeble-minded. -The tragic requital that lay in my father’s soiling his bed like a child during the last days of his life; hence my appearance in the dream as a sick-nurse. -’Here it was as though thinking and experiencing were one and the same thing.’ This recalled a strongly revolutionary literary play by Oskar Panizza, in which God the Father is ignominiously treated as a paralytic old man. In his case will and deed were represented as one and the same thing, and he had to be restrained from cursing and swearing by one of his archangels, a kind of Ganymede, because his imprecations would be promptly fulfilled. - My making plans was a reproach against my father dating from a later period. And indeed the whole rebellious content of the dream, with its lèse majesté and its derision of the higher authorities, went back to rebellion against my father. A Prince is known as the father of his country; the father is the oldest, first, and for children the only authority, and from his autocratic power the other social authorities have developed in the course of the history of human civilization - except in so far as the ‘matriarchy’ calls for a qualification of this assertion. -The phrase ‘

thinking and experiencing were one and the same thing’ had a reference to the explanation of hysterical symptoms, and the ‘male urinal’ belonged in the same connection. I need not explain to a Viennese the principle of the ‘

Gschnas’. It consists in constructing what appear to be rare, and precious objects out of trivial and preferably comic and worthless materials (for instance, in making armour out of saucepans, wisps of straw and dinner rolls) - a favourite pastime at bohemian parties here in Vienna. I had observed that this is precisely what hysterical subjects do: alongside what has really happened to them, they unconsciously build up frightful or perverse imaginary events which they construct out of the most innocent and everyday material of their experience. It is to these phantasies that their symptoms are in the first instance attached and not to their recollections of real events, whether serious or equally innocent. This revelation had helped me over a number of difficulties and had given me particular pleasure. What made it possible for me to refer to this by means of the dream-element of the ‘ male urinal’ was as follows. I had been told that at the latest ‘Gschnas’-night a poisoned chalice belonging to Lucrezia Borgia had been exhibited; its central and principal constituent had been a male urinal of the type used in hospitals.

The two scenes of micturition from my childhood were in any case closely linked to the topic of megalomania; but their emergence while I was travelling to Aussee was further assisted by the chance circumstance that there was no lavatory attached to my compartment and that I had reason to anticipate the predicament which in fact arose in the morning. I awoke with the sensations of a physical need. One might, I think, be inclined to suppose that these sensations were the actual provoking agent of the dream; but I would prefer to take another view, namely that the desire to micturate was only called up by the dream-thoughts. It is quite unusual for me to be disturbed in my sleep by physical needs of any kind, especially at the hour at which I awoke on this occasion - a quarter to three in the morning. And I may meet a further objection by remarking that upon other journeys under more comfortable conditions I have scarcely ever felt a need to micturate when I have woken up early. But in any case it will do no harm to leave the point unresolved.

My experiences in analysing dreams have drawn my attention to the fact that trains of thought reaching back to earliest childhood lead off even from dreams which seem at first sight to have been completely interpreted, since their sources and instigating wish have been discovered without difficulty. I have therefore been compelled to ask myself whether this characteristic may not be a further essential precondition of dreaming. Stated in general terms, this would imply that every dream was linked in its manifest content with recent experiences and in its latent content with the most ancient experiences. And I have in fact been able to show in my analysis of hysteria that these ancient experiences have remained recent in the proper sense of the word up to the immediate present. It is still extremely hard to demonstrate the truth of this suspicion; and I shall have to return in another connection (Chapter VII) to a consideration of the probable part played by the earliest experiences of childhood in the formation of dreams.

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